So I heard many people say after or during the recent ESA conference in Portland that they really enjoyed the converstations more than listening to talks or looking at posters.
There was some chatter about doing an unconference associated with next year’s ESA conference in Minneapolis. And Sandra Chung (@sandramchung) got on it and started a wiki that we can all conribute ideas to. The wiki is here
What is an unconference? The idea of an unconference is to have a community organized meetup in which interactions among people are emphasized over the traditional lecture and poster format. For example, many sessions may just be organized a single idea, and people attending have a discussion around the topic. The format can be decided by the community.
What will we do there? The broadest restriction is that topics should be about science that happens online. You may say, “Well, real ecology happens in the field!”. Yes, but a lot of the products of ecology are put online, and increasingly the discussion of the practice of ecology happens online. Check out the Science Online 2012 website for a little taste of what we hope to achieve next year.
How do I get involved? Go to the wiki and start contributing. There are already some suggestions for topics…Here’s a screenshot of the ideas for Session Proposals page:
Important! Use the #esaun13 hashtag to talk about this unconference on Twitter, G+, and app.net.
Get the .Rmd file used to create this post at my github account.